City of Hope and Ruin

Hi everyone! Today, I have not one guest but two: please, give a warm welcome to authors Kit Campbell and Siri Paulson with their Fantasy Fiction book, City of Hope and Ruin, which also offers some LGBTQ Romance. The authors will be awarding a $50 Amazon or B/N GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour. For more tour stops and more chances to win, please click on the banner above 🙂

City of Hope and Ruin:

Every night the monsters hunt.

A city that is the whole world: Theosophy and her companions in the City militia do their best to protect the civilians from the monsters, but they keep crawling from the Rift and there’s nowhere to run. Theosophy knows she’ll die fighting. It’s the best kind of death she’s seen, and at least she can save lives in the meantime.

They say the Scarred carve you up while you’re still alive.

A village in the shadow of a forest: Refugees from the border whisper about the oncoming Scarred, but Briony can’t convince her brother to relocate his children to safety. Briony will do anything to protect them. She owes them that much, even if it means turning to forbidden magic.

When Theosophy and Briony accidentally make contact across the boundaries of their worlds, they realize that solutions might finally be within reach. A world beyond the City would give Theosophy’s people an escape, and the City’s warriors could help Briony protect her family from the Scarred. Each woman sees in the other a strength she lacks—and maybe something more.

All they need to do is find a way across the dimensions to each other before their enemies close in.

Excerpt:

The spirit was beautiful, a tall, statuesque woman who had a hard glint in her eyes. Her hair was short, indigo blue through the glow and tightly curled, her skin a lighter shade over wiry muscles. One hand clenched a smallish item made of metal, the other a long tube with some kind of blade on the end. Briony had never seen anyone like her. Though she glanced around and held her body like someone expecting danger, her bearing was proud and strong, and every inch of her spoke of power and competency. A warrior. Briony had heard stories of them, left over from the Great War, but had never seen one herself.

Was that when this woman was from? The War?

“The trio—the monsters—where am I?”

Briony realized she hadn’t responded, and that perhaps this spirit had been looking for someone to talk to for a very long time, and maybe she would assume Briony couldn’t see or hear her either. “Don’t be afraid,” she said.

The spirit’s eyebrows rose. “That’s a…never mind. What is this place?”

“Well,” Briony started, taking a step forward. But her ankle buckled and she stumbled, managing to catch herself before she fell.

“You’re injured,” said the spirit. “Were you attacked?”

“Yes—you see, there was a Fracture back there, and—” Confusion crossed the spirit’s face. Maybe she was even older; maybe she didn’t know about the War.

From the authors: How to Deal With Writer’s Block

First of all, I’d like to thank Harmony for hosting our tour stop today! Siri and I are very pleased to be here! I’ve been asked to talk about dealing with writer’s block, oh, the dreaded writer’s block.

Picture this: it’s writing time. You sit down at your computer, go about getting everything ready to go, open your story (or a new document), and…nothing. Nothing feels right. Or worse—nothing comes at all.

What’s a writer to do?

Well, first let’s look at writer’s block as a whole. The thing is, there’s not a single cause of writer’s block. Oh, sure, you’ll find people that say there is. Some people claim that writer’s block stems from fear. Fear of success, fear of failure, fear of disappearing into the void without making a ripple. And sure, there probably is some writer’s block that comes from that. Personally, I feel that most writer’s block comes from a lack of planning, from not knowing how to get your characters from where they are to where you want them to be, or from not being able to figure out how to do something in a way that makes sense and/or is interesting. But I brought up that theory with my local writing group, and we ended up coming up with a whole list of potential writer’s block reasons.

So, unfortunately, writer’s block is a personal sort of thing. People get it for different reasons, and the same person may have it for different reasons at different points in time.

Therefore, I postulate that the first step of dealing with writer’s block is: figure out what the source is.

Do you need to write a story to match a theme (say, for an anthology) and can’t figure out anything that interests you?

Have you written yourself into a corner that you can’t see a way out of?

Does the character that was supposed to be the love interest hate your main character?

Have you spread yourself too thin and are too tired to make any progress?

Are you afraid that you’ll put a story out there and get crickets—or nothing but negativity?

Once you identify the problem, then you can work toward solutions. If you can’t get going, it won’t hurt to check your normal inspiration. If you’ve made lists of potential story ideas, maybe you can go through that and find something to mix in. You can brainstorm what you like in a story and figure out how to add those elements in. If you’ve written yourself into a plot hole, stepping back and looking at your overall plot and story might reveal a way out—or a way to do it better. If your characters aren’t working, throw them out and try other ones, or introduce someone else.

The nice thing about writer’s block is that it’s not some huge, unmovable thing that you can’t get past. It shows up for a reason, and normally that reason can be worked through. And the good news is that, generally, once you’ve worked through it, you come out the other side with something better than you had before.

About the Authors:

It is a little known fact that Kit was raised in the wild by a marauding gang of octopuses. It wasn’t until she was 25 that she was discovered by a traveling National Geographic scientist and brought back to civilization. This is sometimes apparent in the way that she attempts to escape through tubes when startled.

Her transition to normalcy has been slow, but scientists predict that she will have mastered basics such as fork use sometime in the next year. More complex skills, such as proper grocery store etiquette, may be forever outside her reach.

Kit can be found cavorting about the web at her blog (http://landsquidattack.wordpress.com) or website (http://kitcampbellbooks.com), on Pinterest (https://www.pinterest.com/campbell1091/), and even occasionally on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/KitCampbell).

Siri Paulson writes all over the fantasy and science fiction spectrum, including (so far) secondary-world fantasy, urban fantasy, steampunk, Gothic, historical paranormal, and YA with spaceships. She is also the chief editor at Turtleduck Press (http://turtleduckpress.com/). Siri grew up in Alberta, Canada, but now lives in an old house in Toronto. By day, she edits non-fiction for the government. Her other current passion is contra dance, a social/folk dance done to live Celtic and roots music. Her favourite places in the world are the Canadian Rocky Mountains and a little valley in Norway.

Siri’s short fiction and the anthologies she has edited can be found on Turtleduck Press, at http://turtleduckpress.com/wordpress/2010/11/30/who-is-siri-paulson/ . She blogs at https://siripaulson.wordpress.com/ and tweets at http://twitter.com/Siri_Paulson.